When Faced with the End
Heaven Will Be Mine & Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.01 Thrice Upon A Time
At the conclusion of every story, a new beginning has already begun to take shape in the pieces left behind; in the spaces between; within the realization that life rarely gives a fuck about story arcs. No matter how happy and neatly tied up things may seem, what remains and continues from there rarely stays that way.
Heaven Will Be Mine takes place on this precipice, that border between an ending and a glimpse of the future beyond.
Worst Girl Games’ 2018 visual novel has it’s 20th century space race alt-history in the rearview mirror. Humanity unified, colonized the solar system, undertook war against an alien threat with space-native children armored in miracle-performing robots, and won.
And yet, in their resounding victory against the alien Existential Threat, the space-borne humans of Memorial Foundation have made themselves redundant. The war is over, and Earth demands their return home: threatened by progress made from executing the war on Earth’s behalf.
On the eve of impending conflict, Memorial Foundation divides in three: Celestial Mechanics, Cradle’s Graces, and the loyalists that remain. Split along ideological lines on how to proceed, each faction has a central playable pilot:
Luna-Terra
Intent on returning all space-inhabiting humans back under Earth’s influence, Memorial Foundation and their grizzled ace recognize the futility in opposing Earth’s military power. Instead, they strive to broker peace and disarmament to bring everyone home.
Pluto
Declaring independence from Earth, Cradle’s Graces dreams of a space-bound culture that can exist free of, but in parallel to, outside influence. Following in the footsteps of their messianic princess, they’re thankful for their shared history with Earth, but won’t give up their newfound home.
Saturn
Celestial Mechanics, on the other hand, are already on the path of complete divergence. Through transhumanist reimagination, they’re a terse and temporary alliance of misfits unwilling to forgive the scorn of Earth. Instead, they’ve chosen to become that which Earth fears/wants most: a new alien threat to wage conflict against.
What ensues is the push and pull of gravity, of politics, of power, of desire and of the interpersonal relationships between these pilots as envoys of the factions they represent. But while their allegiances may be fluid and everchanging, what remains monolithic is their resounding refusal to go back to the way things were.
Heaven Will Be Mine mirrors this resolve in its structure: while drastic change is inevitable, we come to realize that the game has no interest in exploring bad ends or cul-de-sac-ed outcomes.
This visual novel, in divergence with the legacy of other visual novels and even other “choose-your-own-adventure” paper novels in its ancestry, has no dead-ends in its storytelling. Instead of getting bogged down in an endless maze of “You Died” screens or half-baked bad ends, Heaven Will Be Mine operates under the presupposition that the future we want, whichever one we want, will come to pass. Here, we even trade the idea that a true ending, a perfect state of static utopia, exists. In its place remains the forever in-progress process of finding a new state of being or setting of the table. Whether that takes the form of small incremental steps or a giant leap forward, it will have materialized through our choices here and through our connection to the people around us.
Before missions, you’ll retrieve archived snippets of emails in the form of scientific notes on a pilot subject, private communications between confidants, or high stakes arguments between leaders that gives credence to the eventual divergence of their factions. These flesh out not only the context of the world, but the thoughts and feelings of people living here. The things that concern them, that reassure them, that trouble, divide, and unite them.
Pre-sortie, you’ll text your handler about upcoming missions. Sometimes they’re in doubt about the path they’re taking. Sometimes they’re hyping you up. Sometimes you’re just talking shit about shitty people. But their unerring support is resolute: they’ve got your back; they believe in you, wherever the path forward leads.
And even during missions: where you’re sent out in opposition of one of the other two pilots; rarely is the meat of the prose really about giant mechs fighting in space. Heaven Will Be Mine is nowhere near as concerned with the military minutia of big robots as it is with the traded barbs and feelings and expressions of movement belonging to the pilots that control them.
Each mission in this way, only has a singular decision: voluntarily cede ground and ingratiate yourself to the faction of the pilot you’re sortied against, or convince them to edge closer to yours. Every decision here carries weight; each choice gives “gravity” to one of the three causes. And yet it feels personal: a conversation given form through not only words but in the ways we move, in the ways we fight, struggle, and bleed. We must choose: to compromise or to expend the effort to convince, but to engage nonetheless. There’s no room for stubborn passivity or indifference here.
While the faction with the most influence determines what the future looks like in the end, every encounter and subsequent interaction draws the pilots into closer and closer orbits. And when conflict is conversation and fighting is just flirting with/for dominance; in the backdrop of apocalypse and an ending of life as it’s existed before; all of these interactions serve as a way to identify, both in the mirror and from the other end of the table, a way to move forward in the context of this world, and who moving forward will serve; knowing the inevitable is already in motion.
Rewind twenty years ago to barely-teenage years under-lit by the glow of a portable screen/player combo. In those days, I early-binged the first couple of DVD episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion across a headphone splitter with a friend. In it, NERV and the organization’s child-pilots field giant humanoid robots to stave off the appearance of the Angels: gigantic monsters whose emergence signals the end of the world. New to anime, I was enamored by Gainax and Hideaki Anno’s 1995 TV series filled with all the big-tent things that made Evangelion a cultural phenomenon. The bastardized Judeo-Christian iconography; the militarized near-future visual detail of NERV as secret global organization in opposition with the alien, impossible, unknowability of the Angels; kids fighting to save a world more than willing to grind them into a pulp in the process; hot moms; huge guns; and big “robots”.
While Mecha fiction and even Kaiju fiction writ large is a way for us to reflect how technological advancement amplifies the scale and magnitude of our violence; juxtaposed against the same human conundrums and limitations that exist regardless of scale; the lineage that Heaven Will Be Mine and Evangelion descend from takes a more introspective bent.
Here: the external and internal conflicts are equally gargantuan. The “robot” shell we inhabit has always been an oversized extension of the body we’re already in: echoing grander scales of violence and lethality and power to face obstacles world-ending in scale; but just as equally an extension of our flesh and blood identity and a means which we relate and bridge the gap to others. And so, behind that metallic veneer and the ending of the world outside, Evangelion is also about drowning in the depths within: a sad, bleak, gasping for air nihilism made real by the protagonist’s (and director’s) tangible depression.
With mechs as the means, Evangelion asks: if we became gods, how far would we go to not feel alone.
Throughout the series, Shinji as protagonist is constantly at odds with his reluctant role as pilot, exacerbated by an often crippling mental state. Shackled with a fear of abandonment after being sent away in the wake of his mother’s death, he fails time and time again to reconcile his desire to feel needed by others with the violence and pain he must endure once his father calls him back into service. Compounded upon by the impossible odds at the end of the world, its no surprise that he often teeters at the edge of shutting down in response.
Through Shinji, Evangelion has always been clear about its stance on the reality of living on this Earth. Before us lies the mirrored enormity of apocalypse by our own making and an ever widening interpersonal gulf of detachment from the people around us. And, as history and ending after re-attempted ending have shown and agonized over, no matter the odds, Evangelion has been convinced we’ll fail at both.
For a long time, Evangelion remained this way: deeply troublesome and unable to find the words it, Anno, and Co have wanted to say.
Until finally, after decades of spinoffs, retellings, and reattempt after reattempt at new ending movies, the series was finally succeeded by the remake/retelling/meta-sequel Rebuild of Evangelion four-part movie series: recently concluded by Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon a Time.
With 3+1 as the final conclusion, there are two major beats in this final movie that somehow, in this multi-decade-long journey, provide some sort of catharsis. On the cusp of inescapable change and a final good bye, Evangelion imagined a way out; a path forward; an initial step; a brief, but tiny, evolution.
In the first act, our original three pilots: Shinji, Rei, and Asuka; earn a brief respite from the chaos of conflict in one of the few remaining human settlements holding out amidst the ongoing apocalypse. Even in the ruins of this world, there are still people surviving and getting by. Hemmed in by the encroaching hellscape that the rest of the world has become, this little farm town gives us a glimpse, for the first time ever in the series, of what a good, normal life might have been like for these characters. We forget that the world outside is being transformed into primordial soup and are transported back to a time when things were simpler. A moment of kindness and community is bestowed upon these children; when we know that in past / future / parallel lives, they’re not fated for any of it.
And this luddite approach has some charm to it. Our protags are surrounded by warmth and people, by agency over the things they eat, empowered over human-sized stakes and responsibilities (or lack thereof) for the first time in a long time.
We get a glimpse at how their connections or reconnections with people around them can materialize a normal life. And normal life being really just the beginning of something happier, healthier, and as this final entry argues, simpler for the better. It sets up a yearning for these “good-ol’-days”, and argues for what can be possible if we harken back to them.
The second beat of note here is the final concluding conflict with Gendo. As Shinji’s father who is both entirely opposite and yet also in the same place as his son, there is no limit to the pain he’s willing to inflict on others to avoid loneliness. Single-mindedly focused on bringing back Yui: his wife and the only person he’s ever felt connection with; he’s willing to literally revert the world to primordial soup to overcome his sense of isolation and reunite with her.
In their final cross-dimensional / dream state / fight, what begins as conflict devolves to conversation. Clashing mechs fall away to the clashing of wheels against tracks on an empty train car shared between the two of them. Because what Shinji has been chasing for all this time was a way to talk to his dad too far gone, too far out of reach. And simply just to say that he understands him; to convey that neither of them have never really been alone; to impart that they do and always will have the choice not to be.
This echoes as a wakeup call for both of them.
That really all this hyper-introspective navel-gazing has been pretty counter-productive. That maybe that first step, that recognition of shared pain and struggle, is enough of a first start.
Shit, I’m being targeted here.
In making peace with one another and themselves, Gendo realizes the mistake he’s made, and leaves Shinji with the inheritance and blessing to remake the world. And Shinji, finally ready to move on and live the life he never really allowed himself to live, imagines an existence free of gods and Evangelion, free of Angels and Existential Threats, harkening back to simpler times and normal-er realities.
We awaken to Shinji in modern day Japan, with Anno’s hometown as the backdrop of a normal life and the beginning of a new future.
Perhaps the world we’ve been given isn’t so awful after all.
While I was satisfied with what the future holds for Shinji and Co, filled with hope that these characters can finally live a life, I know this is only the beginning of a new first step.
This final movie is an opportunity to let go of the anxiety and fear that the apocalypse will be the end. That regardless of whether a new beginning or nothingness is left in the ashes, endeavoring to overcome these bodies and bridging the gulf between one another is preferable to having never attempted either at all. Gendo’s regret is palpable, look at all he’s lost, and how much pain Shinji has endured to overcome it.
While Eva posits that an ending is simply a new chance to restart, harken backward to fundamentals, and rebuild, this only can get us as far as the present. Heaven Will Be Mine is the step taken after: an exploration of what it would be like if, even in the face of a new end, this practice of interconnectedness became second nature; a discovery of the kinds of futures and possibilities of being we’d be able to imagine.
Because what Heaven Will Be Mine isn’t about is choosing between people. There is never an option to let a friendship die, or to choose one love interest over another. While our choices are constrained to engagement, this is the kind of compromise and expended effort that is required to build real relationships too. Sometimes we need to be reminded of that. Our connections here aren’t some sort of goal or ending to be achieved, they’re a means and practice through which we can look to the people that matter to us most to navigate and self discover our identity and place in the world.
There are no bad ends here, no failure states, no outcome where we can run away for perpetuity. That even in the face of an ending we can always rebuild or retry and lean on the people around us. And maybe, bestowing myself that bit of grace, was refreshing for once.
Because I can already see all the ways we can fail.
We are seeing, in real time, all the ways we are failing.
And perhaps, for once, playing:
with the cheats on, free of fail-states and dead-ends and backslides
knowing we will figure it out despite these pitfalls
made me realize that the goal has never been to save or change the world
but just to pause and imagine what a good life might mean and look like
alongside the people that I want to be there for when I find it
and that to strive for it, earnestly, is enough, knowing
one day, we can get there, and then imagine what’s next.
Thanks for reading! This one has taken… a while.
Heaven Will Be Mine by Worst Girl Games @ pillowfight.io/heaven-will-be-mine
Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.01 Thrice Upon A Time by Studio Khara @ evangelion.co.jp
